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Category: Speculation

Since I’ve been writing I’ve gotten some interesting comments. Some are conventional Christians who don’t seem to “get” what I’m doing. They either don’t read or misunderstand what I’m writing. Truly, they are stuck in narrow ideas of what is right and what is to be believed, and any other, any strange type of thought is basically Satan. Others are different, their polar opposite, as in, “I don’t believe in the fairy in the sky.” And this, which inspires the writing here: that the idea of God, etc., is “a bunch of mythological stories that have no place in 2015”. This side… it is more of what I can relate to. And I think I have an answer to its line of argument. I do not have an response to the other side, those who are stuck in doctrine, what traditional religion affords. In my experience they cannot be reasoned with, for they think that God is with them. But the atheists: these most likely have had religion pumped into them, and have had cause to reject it. Yes, they can be pig headed, too, but I think it is with them that Jesus himself would have sat with. And if the conventional Christians asked why, it would be, “The ones who need a doctor aren’t the healthy but the sick.” [Mark 2:17]

First let’s look at why conventional Christians are so annoying (including Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who actually bring the Annoying to where you live). They can be forgiven, if you think about it. In their mind, the only way that anyone will go to Heaven when you die, the only way anyone can be “saved”, is if they accept the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that he came back from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. Maybe one might also add that we’re waiting for him to come back. So in being “annoying” as I’ve said, in their mind, their imposing their beliefs on you is the greatest thing that they can do, because the possibility exists that with their proselytizing that they are saving your immortal soul from an eternity in the flames of Hell. At points, I have taken to be of the Annoying. But I snapped out of it, and my reason is scriptural: Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” [John 6:44] I would find other reasons, later.

So, am I positing that the traditional notions of how salvation works—that the mechanisms are not in fact what they have been believed to be? Or even further, is the thought itself about God and Jesus an archaic notion that we have outgrown? Can we evolve religious thought to the point where they are relevant to the here and now, some two millennia after the Blessed One left the building? One wonders if we are not working along the lines of the Ancient Aliens mode of thought. Basically, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I watch that show, and it seems for every single “extraordinary” occurrence, we invoke the idea that ancient extraterrestrials are the most likely cause. Science teaches us that we should suspend judgment until we have verifiable evidence that a certain thing is true. The claims of many religions—are they a part of the same general conversation as those claiming that the ancient gods were actually aliens from a distant star? Some skeptics call themselves “Pastafarians”, and they say their god is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, telling you that your belief in “higher powers” are just as ridiculous. Are we at something of a crisis point in religion? For to any awake spiritualist, the FSM people really do have a point.

The last crisis in God, in my reckoning, happened to the Jews in 586 BC. This was the beginning of the Babylonian captivity, when the great temple built by Solomon was destroyed—where in fact the Jew’s God, Yahveh, was supposed to have had His dwelling on earth. But instead of that being the end of their whole belief system (for it usually was thought that if one people defeated another, it was one god triumphing over another), their faith, in fact, became stronger. Much stronger. Before, though they professed to only worship Yahveh, there has been found in the archeology of where they lived, many idols—of other gods. But after their exile in Babylon? Zip. None. They believed it was because of those other gods that they were allowed to be so captured, so they paid attention to that first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” And that was the other point: it was actually God acting through the Babylonians as His intermediaries that God brought judgment upon them. Yahveh was not only now the God of the Jews, He was the God over everyone. And that was how it played out in the last crisis.

Perhaps this new crisis doesn’t seem anywhere near as severe as that last one. This one I would say has its source in the repercussions of the Enlightenment. When Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead.” This was when we stopped believing in fairy tales, one might put it. Rationality had gotten in vogue. It was as if we had been carrying a load, going down the road we had always been going down, when suddenly we asked, “Why are we doing this?” And sought instead to unburden ourselves. We looked at the idea of God, and of religion, and a lot of us decided that it didn’t make sense. Not anymore. Not when we had better ideas of why things were they way they were. We started seeing more and more naturalists, those who saw explanations for things in natural order as opposed to “because God”. It has been, so far, a very fruitful way of looking at the world, a view that has given us our current state of science and technology. And so there we have it, why that person had deigned to remark that the idea of God had no place in this current age, well past the Enlightenment. We should stop looking for that fairy in the sky.

This is the crisis now. As Julian Huxley put it, “Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat.” He does seem to have a point, no? Who used to cause lightning? God. Now? It’s just a large charge that travels that path you see, usually from the ground up. What used to be there when you looked up? God in His Heaven. Now? God is definitely not looking down on us from there. There’s mostly empty space, sad to report. We have moved, most of us who still believe, we have moved the “real” Heaven into a completely separate dimension, which mortal eyes seldom travel to. The functions and trappings of God have been invaded… by science, it would appear. Or has it? Couple interesting points, one being that when Jesus ascended into the sky, he disappeared into a cloud; he did not do a “rocket man” sort of stunt and keep going. And the other is that Paul says there is the seen world, and the unseen world, and whereas the seen world is temporary, the unseen world was the one that would keep going. Things like these two are mysteries that can perhaps survive whatever science throws our way. Especially if science can actually make sense of them as they are described in our holy books.

But maybe they have a point. Maybe a God who tells us to kill every last single living being in a city because of their sinful ways—maybe that kind of God we can do without. Maybe it was good way to go back then, when we were without even a Roman road system in place, but now? We don’t look so adoringly at whoever it is that has us kill people, for whatever reason. But nowadays, if He’s not telling us to enact things like that, what is it that He is doing, way “up there”? Why exactly do we need Him, again? Maybe we need another way of looking at things. Could it be, that as He abandons the closer spheres, as He seems to move out of our focus, does He draw us—our imagination—out into the far expanse in following where He retreats to? Let those who have eyes see. So, as we look back to what happened in the previous crisis, is this the next quantum leap that we utilize to solve things, to rescue God from irrelevance, a natural next vault? The idea of God, we to place it properly in the frame of new paradigms. Because however far out we go, might we find that He is already there, having waited for us to figure it out.

Even were there no mystery to the world at all, you know there still would be one that will defy all efforts to codify? We ask, what is love? For the most profound words that ever was written, anywhere, throughout history and into the furthest future, is the minimal sentence in 1 John: “God is love.” C. S. Lewis wrote about that phrase that we should understand it doesn’t mean, “love is God,” but I beg to differ. I think that that is precisely what it means. As Oscar Wilde put it, “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” There is nothing real but love, no matter how tangible that thing might be. Now, seeing that we say of some phenomena that it is not “because God”, then God retreats from the science—when there is no mystery, there is not God, it seems—but that most profound statement will ensure that there will always be somewhere God has His space: “God is love.” Because if you say you know what love is, I will ever say you are a fool in your simplicity. And that is not the good simple, for it is that love itself is so simple, we’ll never understand it.

As far as God’s seeming brutality, one looks to the Book of Job for an answer, for one thing. It is Satan who brings disaster to Job, but at the end, when God finally speaks, He merely asks, who are you to judge Me? Satan is not mentioned at all. It might most possibly be that something was going on “behind the scenes”, as it were, in the seeming cruelty behind some of God’s decrees. There is certainly mystery there, and we may never fully understand it. And look at the Son of God: was not he himself cruelly put to death? He says that he is doing the Father’s will, yet is it not the Devil who orchestrates the whole affair? Can we see some sort of pattern here? God means for all this to happen! But—and this is an important but—He knows how all of this will turn out! Out of the horrors that avail themselves of this world, the pain will have an end. It is so written. And back to where God directly orders to kill: I will not cop out and say that God makes up for it to the victims of those orders. There is another possibility, that that, along with other stories about God in the Bible, were not meant literally that they happened as written. Perhaps another cop out. My thoughts: He works with the tools that exist.

His message to the early Hebrews, by ordering mass killing? I am no one to be trifled with. This establishes Him among the ancients in a way that nothing else could. Yes, to our modern sensibilities it is cruel, perhaps evil to do things in this way, but do we call the lion who kills his prey evil? Who are we to judge Him? Back to Job again. Where were you when He fluctuated the original wave that caused matter to coalesce in just that certain way, for the stars to align in subtle gravity, back at the Big Bang? Because as God became larger in the first crisis of faith, in this one, He takes His final size: greater than the billions upon billions of galaxies where in each one are billions upon billions of stars, each burning nuclear light—all that is a mote in His eye. Do you understand the concept: infinity? You know, you can; it’s in those three words: God is love. Isn’t that His way, though? Love is the chiefest and best way to know infinity. To know the mind of God.

It is what Lucifer failed to understand: you cannot kill God. And as our perspective on the Supreme Being shifts, so that He appears different to us than in generations past, one might say that we have now more or less a “grown up” picture of Him. When this race, the human race, was young, we were fed with milk. And now we are ready for the solid food. We are finally at the point where we understand what it means: civilization. Everyone as equals, with all due basic human rights. We have (right now!) the means by which the entire world may be fed. Verily, the prophet quoth: “The Beginning is near!” And perhaps it needs to get worse before it gets better, but it will get better. Now, watch as the idea of God grows up, for it may be that we do not need Him in the Age of Gold that tantalizingly peeks out at us at the horizon’s edge, but the world will only make sense if He is in it. God is waiting for us to understand the world enough that we don’t use Him as a placeholder. To see what it is, His true function: God is love. Even if you don’t believe in Him at all.

This is the great war, as viewed from sea level: sense versus nonsense. That’s it. Maybe there’s more? Read on. The nonsense is generated for some private end, usually for the money, sometimes for the power, a lot of times for both (having one generally gets the other). It usually turns out that there is no other conspiracy than these. Yes, we’re in it between good vs. evil, but the way it plays out in what we call reality, sense vs. nonsense is what it actually boils down to. And I don’t know (though I have some idea of how it happened), but here in the middle 2010s, there are a LOT of people who identify themselves as Christians who are part of the nonsense. At least some of them can’t help it, having been indoctrinated from an early age in a simplistic idea of what that means, to be a Christian, and what to do with the book they thump—the Bible being then used to cover up the light, instead of being a light.

Contrary to what some so called “Christians” think, faith is not a substitute for intelligence. Indeed, ignorant faith can be what is diametrically opposed to true faith. In the parable of the sower, some seeds fell along a path and the birds came and ate it up. Explaining this, Jesus said that these were those who heard the good news, and did not understand it. Those who do not understand the real message of Jesus Christ are caught up in the care of themselves, and seem not to care for the welfare of others. The thought that other people should do as we do, and believe what we believe. “They should change to fit our idea of how things should be. We should not have to change ourselves at all, for we are of the elect, and therefore justified in discriminating against you, and shutting you down if you are different. Because we know we are right! For Jesus is on our side…” These people are scary.

Going a level up in this argument, these may say, “But are you not doing the same thing, here, to say we should think like you?” When you do not love your neighbor as yourself, that is what is against Christ. Do you not understand the Gospel? We are all of us sinners, no one of us better than the rest. We are called to be like Christ, who sat with the despised: do not do the despising. Do you want to be angry at someone? Direct your anger at the rich, who do hateful things and get away with them because of their wealth. This is what Christ did. And he was with the times, back 2000 years ago, that some of the traditions of religion were outdated, and if you have ears to hear, understand that some of the traditions of 2000 years ago are now, too, outdated. We’re not supposed to keep slaves anymore. And women should be seen as equal to men. Use your intelligence, and keep your faith. Such is a narrow way, indeed.

It is getting exceedingly easy these days to pick out which people are the ones to root against, and yet people seem to have trouble seeing it: the love of money is the root of all evil. [1 Timothy 6:10] Take a look, and follow the money. It almost always overflows into the cesspools of the human soul. But yet people do not see it. They don’t see what they don’t want to see, it would appear, or are their gazes averted for them? Surely, they are given distractions, given a moral high ground, given enemies. Then, they can make believe that the fight they fight is that primal good vs. evil, God vs. the Devil, no matter that the enemies are more vulnerable than they, because such us vs. them mentalities fit in a soundbite, can be catchy. And what makes their ears shut out the voices of reason—it’s because the voices of reason don’t tell them they’re the hero, and the soundbite does.

So is this writing doing the same thing? In saying that we are the good guys, are we then deluding ourselves in the same way? Indeed, if we say that there is no fault in what we do, we surely delude ourselves. But it is not enough to pick a side and push as hard as we can in that direction, we must apply the prudence that is available to us. For instance, those who say they are Christian like to think that they live according to the teachings of the Bible, but in many cases, it is not the case. If you study the history of the “values” they hold, you will usually find that they are traditions from human beings, not decrees of God that they follow. And in joining like minded people like those of that tradition, they get a little mental reward, when they believe that they are somehow “in the right”, and other people are not, and so they are “better people”. If you follow wisdom, however, you will see that the goal is not to be better than anyone else—it is instead to strive for equality, for we are all sinners.

Do you imagine that in following the dictates of the church instead of the dictates of reason that we follow Christ? That to follow in Christian tradition instead of what is in the heart is to be Jesus’ disciple? So it is written: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God,” [John 1:1] and of that Logos, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” [John 1:10] The word “Logos” is usually translated as “Word”, but I find it loses too much in the translation. “Logos” is of the same root as “logic”, and it means something like “reason”, and being capitalized, it would be “holy reason”. The Logos is the means by which anything works, here in the prime material plane. That this is Christ means we follow sense before nonsense, even if what is sense is called agnostic, and the nonsense is labeled Christian. And if you follow doctrine instead of the heart, you do not know him.

You are on one side or the other, sense and nonsense at odds expressible as logos vs. derangement, as to how it relates to reality, to things that exist in our material realm. If you do not yourself know which side you are on, or think of course you’re on the side of the Logos, there are a couple questions you can ask yourself. Is what you believe at all realistic? Because the Logos is all about being real. If you think you are a Christian because you believe the age of the world is 6000 years, then no, you’re not being realistic. And frankly, you’re not being Christian, because the Logos is not about trying to fit the wide world into your “little box of things that make sense to me because I never tried to understand what’s really out there”. Say hello to science. What is transcendent needs no protection from science. Put in another way, your God is too small.

The other question you can ask is if you want to impose your way of seeing things upon others, who think differently. There is something similar to doing that which is perfectly fine—that would be logical argument (logos again)—but to say, do it this way only because that’s what the Bible says (according to me or my group)? No. Try again. This time, with intelligence. When science tells you to do things, like to vaccinate your kid, it is not just “because I believe this is true”, and if you think your faith trumps science, especially because you think God is on your side, see above. You are not Christian simply because you go to church. I want to make this clear, if it wasn’t before: being a Christian means that you make sense. It is to be on the side of logos, and not derangement, however high and mighty that derangement sounds. And science—or anything like it—is not from the Devil, just because you don’t understand it. It is, again, quite from the Logos. It is a way to make sense of things.

Understood, bad things have been done in the name of science, but even worse has been done in the name of God. We live in an age where an entire world’s worth of information is at our fingertips. We can easily do the research when something comes up to make us question. We can start making sense of things, even if we have been told lies. It can be frightening to do, to question things that we’ve always believed. But to anyone who feels anchorless unless possessed of the simplistic “truths” that made sense of everything, or who could stuff all the outliers in the blanket cast of “Satan”: think for yourself. And further, if you want a place to start thinking for yourself, that is unquestionably in the Spirit, look, and see: God is love. Even if you don’t believe in God, you can believe that. And if your God is not love, I take off my sandals and shake your dust off them. Good luck in the Judgment.

On that last point, indeed, let it be known that sense, reason is not an end to itself. But it is the only ground from which love can grow. In thinking that God is love, it is the highest ideal for which we can strive, and gives us perspective on all things. Even if there were no God, He exists in our minds as the greatest possible being, and that structures the rest of which we can know as a light at the top shining down. It is hope itself. Let it be how you can make sense of every last thing. And remember, if you do not pick a side, you are not making sense: you are, in fact, choosing nonsense. For the tendency of the world is toward nonsense, toward entropy, unless we do something about it. It is the cost of living. And truly, that is better than dying: do you not see? have you not heard? Love is the only thing in all the world that is real. If it is not of love, it is illusion. Do not spend your precious life on a mirage, while you are in the desert, wasting away. That’s just nonsense. Nonsense.

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It was once a radical monism: there was one God and He was responsible for everything. “I create the weal and the woe,” He says in Isaiah. He was a one stop shop. So is Deuteronomy: “The LORD our God is One.” After that, it appears to come that there was a Satan who was a minor functionary in God’s court: simply, the Accuser, who still took orders from that God Most High. This is how he is depicted in the Book of Job. He does nothing without God’s approval. But by the time we get to the days of Jesus, the Christ, then Satan had become the prince of demons, who is described to have fallen from Heaven like lightning. And he’s stayed there until present day, waiting for us to think on the situation: it was here that I wondered about the problem of evil, and the problem of pain.

The problem of evil was actually pretty simple, if it did not contain the problem of pain. It consists of a simple question, why is there evil in the world? And if you do not count the problem of pain, it can be answered almost trivially, because God grants free will to his creations, and it is their responsibility to choose well, and some do not. But the problem of pain, which is to ask why there is pain in the world: if we include natural disasters and such, that cannot be solved by the wills of His creations, can it? The considering of it, it comes down to power. We generally believe that disasters are “acts of God”, basically—surely the Devil hath not such fury. Can he? How do we think on divine terms? If we look up into the night sky, while out in the rural plains, we can see in the expanse of stars a hint of the true glory of God. What if the power we once thought God to have—what most of us think right now think of God having, based on the story of Exodus and such—what if that is actually the scope of power of an archangel, and the power that God can conceivably wield is well beyond what our knowledge can reach?

It is to introduce a radical dualism, then. We introduce a very basic premise: what if Lucifer invented pain? What if all that has ever gone wrong, anywhere, what if all of it (ultimately) came from the Devil? Because now, if we have an Evil of cosmic scope, doing his utmost to create havoc and such, couldn’t this be so? To put it simply, if we think things through, none of it came from God. Surely, God will make use of it, just like nature makes use of excrement as plant fertilizer, but recall your last dose of pain: odds are, it was an ugly feeling; if you think about it, it makes sense that God didn’t think that stuff up. Its semblance… brutishly rough is its aesthetic, as if it were invented without that certain skill: pain is a stab of wrong.

It can be therefore solved, how it is that God is all good while there is evil in the world: at every level, there is at its ultimate source a creature of His at fault, great or small, one or more who are where the buck stops at the causational chain of pain; if there is merely the barest of conscious choice that became something whose pain held some significance. Or perhaps that some pain that came from a previous pain, for it oft begets some more of it. All its source, however, is an ill-applied exercise of free will, for in the days primordial, one imagines a Heaven where literally anything was possible, even the first evil, the first sin, the first of pain. Born, in its preliminary stages, all of what is wrong with the world.

Now, why does God let it happen, still? We do not comprehend the patience of the Most High: this is what is meant by a thousand years being like a day to Him. It is not that time flies by at a quicker pace to His observation. Quite the opposite, that he can see of a greater scope of all that happens, just that His patience carries Him through all of it. If you yourself had patience, you would see. Why did not Jesus Christ, the Son of God, not rid us of all the problems in the world? Don’t you see? It’s part of His plan that things happen as they do. Why would Jesus make of things against that plan? Why does God allow evil to continue? There will be a day of reckoning. That day will come like a thief in the night, when we have long stopped looking for it to show. Hearken. He yet in patience watches.

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What are we to do with Judas? Why was I given merely the stark knowledge that he was innocent, and then not given anything decisively corroborating? This is not all a test of faith, I know, for in my calculus it was part of that grandest plan, which relied on intricate details, an incredibly vast network of what needed to happen, and when, and where. This of which was I allowed to glimpse, if not the smallest part, nowhere near a complete picture. It was one of those insights where you seem to be solving something by your own chemistry, but also where an unseen hand perhaps gives guidance, perhaps more: I saw that the entire “Judas betrayed Christ to his crucifixion” meme was allowed to propagate, throughout the whole world, for 2000 years of history, and why? to be picked up in a very strange way by me? this to nail the very linchpin in the ultimate victory of God vs. Satan, good vs. evil?

Me and my visions had been tossing around the idea of Universalism, that in the end, everyone would be saved—even the Devil. Pay your dues, everyone, and you too will be welcomed into eternal life. And I must admit, I saw the charm in it, that when the Lord died for us all, he was dying so that absolutely everyone would be saved. So as I was circling around this notion in my visions and my mind, as I said, and there came up a certain condition to this idea. A line in John’s Gospel, where our Lord said, “Only one was lost.” He had meant Judas, of course, but it was being repurposed here. Now, even though everybody and their dog were to be saved, Judas was to be lost, into a realm without a Savior, a world without God, at all. It was going to be a horror beyond horrors. The kicker? The visions said he was innocent of any wrong. He was going to volunteer for this.

Now, to anyone who went to Sunday school, they’ll point out that the Bible says differently about those events that led to the crucifixion of our Lord. But I’m not the only one who holds such views like these. Other people have written about their theories on the matter, such as how Judas was made as to be symbol for “the Jews”, who were ultimately, supposedly responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Or so the Bible says, especially in the Gospel According to John. “Judas” is the same name as “Judah”, the tribe of David and our Lord, and where the designation “Jew” comes from. You should know it just cannot be said that “the Jews” were solely responsible for the death of our Lord, if you put any scholarship to it whatsoever. Pontius Pilate wouldn’t have given a second’s thought about offing someone suspicious of sedition, and the washing the hands of the blood of our Christ was a Jewish gesture, not Roman (he probably didn’t do it). Pilate hated Judea. The Bible is not history, nor does it pretend to be. You should know that.

I look back on the visions I have had, and cannot myself believe what they might mean, since they appear to hold such gravity, and I am just a sinner. Has it truly happened, the scenes that I have seen before my eyes, which held in them the ultimate oracles? Who was I to be an agent in the Plan, so deep in the Powerful Play I would see where God and man intersect? It is easier to believe that I was just viewing some imagination—if not mine, then from some base source, at best. And I wonder if the prophets of old felt something like this. Or perhaps to say as the prophet Amos: “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees.” [Amos 7:40 NIV] …or am I just a madman, who dreamed of love like no one else I have heard of? what the possibility is when you say, “God is love. Literally.” That that’s actually what is out in infinity!

I would be informed of it, after it had happened—and I figured some of it out—the whole reason the world was led to believe what they did about Judas (the entire “betrayed his Lord for 30 pieces of silver” plotline): what the one phrase, “Only one was lost” would lead me to see. At the time, I was in a hospital room, after the last crazy day of “The Event”, I called it: the end of the War in Heaven. Secret Christians I had been in contact with in my visions told me that Judas was innocent, and in fact, I met the man Judas himself; he seemed a stand up fellow. He was about to volunteer to be the sacrifice that would allow all other creatures to be saved. He, only he was going to have no savior at all. So it came time to enter into his impenetrable “vial”, where that horror was going to be sealed off from the rest of anyone… including God. As he was about to go in, I stared at a patch of space before my eyes, as if there were a subtle glow there. And then *snap*, the space was dead. He was gone.

What I would later prize was that indeed, as Judas was innocent, when we waited for him to go—no one wanted to be the one to push him in, and I think he was still “girding his loins” (for something else, it turned out to be), when that *snap* happened. It wasn’t him. It was the fruition of a plan 2000 years in the making. Because someone did (try to) push him into the horror—Satan, of course. And to commit such a heinous act (I believe he tried to tempt me to do it, to push Judas in, and there was no way I was going to), in this case, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back: what I saw was the death of Satan. His soul had been hanging from a thread, at that point, and that was the glow in the space I saw. When no one was pushing Judas off the precipice, he couldn’t resist making that injustice happen, to make that atrocity the keystone of all salvation for all the world—he committed to it right there: he committed to it all. And Judas Iscariot never knew. We had all been told different things, at the time.

What does this have to do with anything? I have seen many things in my visions, through the years. Much of it is (very) confusing, and some parts conflicted with other parts, and some parts conflicted with reality; it took me a long time to figure out why things were so chaotic. It would seem that Lucifer in Heaven was using me as something of an index, of the possibilities of what reality it would be that he was going to commit to. I have seen very weird possibilities, like the Roman Empire lasting to the present day; all of humanity caught in wells of pain, to be rescued after a horrific experience; possibilities where Jesus Christ was married; or where no one could make sense of what our Lord was talking about. Where trees were conscious, and there they shared their secret lives with me. Dreams. Nightmares. None of them were real, not until the last month of the Year of the Dragon, 2013. Why did it matter that Lucifer commit this possibility? Very simple, really. It was the only one where the good guys won.

To be fair, we worked harder in this one because we knew this was going to be the one, and Lucifer sort of stretched himself thin, but he thought he could do it; he thought he could do better than God. And those other possibilities? They never existed. All we have of them are the pictures that reflected into our own world, our own “dimension”, or seeming dimension, plane of existence: none of the others have any reality to them. They are relegated to imagination, only. The thing that boggles my mind is that I could be witness to something that important. Yeah, you might say that I’m just a crazy man, talking to angels and spirits of people dead and alive, with his role to play in the War in Heaven—but I can explain everything. All you have to concede me is that line from Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I can tell you what I’ve discovered, and it can rationally be seen to make sense.

Poor Judas, if this is supposedly true. Who betrayed Christ? The word, “betray”, should be instead, “hand over”. It is translated so in other places in the Bible. One book I read about Judas says that as the writing of the Gospels progress, he is put in more and more of an evil cast. The culmination being John’s Gospel, the last one written, where he is called “son of perdition”. I talked about his possible innocence with a local pastor, and he said that the only degree he could be innocent was like when God hardened the heart of Pharoah, so Moses could bring down the plagues upon Egypt. In other words, not innocent at all. It’s in the Bible, right? So, what now? Well, we know for a scientific fact that the human race wasn’t started by the single pair, Adam and Eve. If you say that not to believe in one part nullifies the whole thing, may I say: you should scrap it. If your faith cannot stand a single dose of reality, let me tell you: your faith is worthless if it be that weak.

What would you do if a prophet came, and told you things that was different from what was written? For it has happened before. The prophet Jeremiah was put under house arrest because he went against the teaching that the House of David would always rule in Jerusalem. It had been written. But times changed. What does it matter to you if Judas is innocent? Will you then be lost, for you would not know what to believe? These things stay solid: love God, with all your heart, and all your action; and love your neighbor as yourself. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Forgive your brother not once, or twice, not seven times, but seventy times seven times. If you’re going to be angry at any group of people, let it be the rich. Not the prostitute, not the addict: the rich. They have the means to defend themselves. Only cowards persecute those weaker than they. When you hear a prophet and want to say, that totally contradicts the Bible! So? Would you try to silence that true prophet who brings the message?

In my vision of Judas, I asked him straight up: “Did you betray Our Lord? Not just hand him over, betray? Or let’s say it in another way, to say it even simpler: was it something he actually wanted you to do?” And he answered, “Yes.” It has been hard for me to believe it, too, you see. I have read the Bible cover to cover ten times. The betrayal of Christ by Judas is one of the main threads of the New Testament. Why exactly, now, am I saying that he’s actually innocent of the charges? I gave it some thought: what would the forces of evil stand to gain if he were actually guilty, and we thought him innocent? The only thing I might think that would do is to shake at one’s faith, that the Bible is not absolutely true, in a fundamental sense. But… we can’t believe it in that anyway, can we? This appears, then, to be a test of faith… but in which direction? If we have matured to the point where we can look to the Bible and yet not believe in six literal days of creation, not stone to death an adulterer, or a child who talks back, etc., etc…. what if in this, our collective faith… we grow up?

One question might settle things: did Judas Iscariot repent? Matthew 27:3-5 says: “Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.” Do we conveniently forget this passage? Are we in truth only listening to tradition, and not seeking what the truth may be? Let’s say I am wrong about the Bible misrepresenting our man Jude (yes, you shorten it like that). The Bible, right there, says he repented. Don’t you see that, when it’s right in front of your face, right there? If not, it’s you Gandhi was talking about when he said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

This is what Jesus Christ railed against. The Pharisees were following their traditions instead of following God. How does one follow God? Love. Even were it true, that Judas betrayed Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the Bible is telling you that he repented. In thinking that, it may make you feel queazy that someone who did something that wrong could be forgiven, but you forget one of the Lord’s parables. A man with a field hires workers at the beginning of the day and through the remainder of the day, and he pays everyone the same wage. This is our Savior’s forgiveness. And you, who has less on his own head to be forgiven than Judas might have, you may think it unfair, like those longsuffering workers. But you are not the Judge. That is not ours to be! So, what shall we do with Judas? The answer to that question is inevitable, given what salvation is. Like the one whom he supposedly wronged, in the worst way, let us do like that God-man would: let us forgive him.

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Epicurus asks of the theist, if God has the will and the ability to prevent evil, why is there evil in the world at all? The question reminds me of one of the temptations of the Devil when our Lord was fasting in the desert: “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'” [Matthew 4:6 NIV] One imagines, whatever the Devil says about how things are, had the Lord jumped from the building, he would have seriously injured himself. It’s not what the passage meant. And of Epicurus’ interpretation of what God is supposed to do, he thinks not of another possibility in the apparent inaction of God: would things have happened for a better end, for all eternity, had some finite evil been allowed to prosper in the world? One might think then that it is quite worth it, the suffering that we spend.

I have written before that all pain has source in that one who rebelled at the beginning of time, at the end of time: Lucifer invented the concept of that which is wrong. But he is not the Logos, he is not how things come to be in the world; could it be true, however, that he was power enough, that in expending his whole potential, he could force the hand of even the Most High? One thinks of this passage, of what kind of curse Lucifer might have uttered: “To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.” [Herman Melville] I once had a vision of Lucifer with a dagger in his hand, with a great stab into the back of the Lord Jesus Christ, right where neck and shoulders meet. Was this image as it is written in Revelation, the Lamb slain at the foundation of the world? It might truly be the case that there is a certain way things must transpire in the world, for prophecy needs be fulfilled, and the will of God must be made manifest.

One might think that it is in those terms that any sort of pain happens, even the greatest natural disasters. Being Logos and omniscient, the Lord knows exactly what happens, and how. And the why may seem long separate from the event, but it is there, too, somewhere in the matrix of all. Even his own death, he is the means by which it happens, for the Logos is the Holy Reason by which all things transpire: the very logic of logic. So in that sense, it is true when God says, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.” [Isaiah 45:7 NIV] But that there needs to be disaster at all: Lucifer threw a wrench into the gears of the Godhead. This was when he invented pain. I have written of this before, his committing of the first sin, and thus the formation of his daughter, who is also called Error, as well as Sin and Pain. To Lucifer and his own were given an aeon in which they might have influence, in which we live. And so there is pain.

It is not as if God spared Himself pain, for as we know, Jesus Christ was God, and he was executed in tremendous suffering. One might suppose that it was not his preference to go in that way, being that the night before, he prayed that that cup should pass from him; but not his will, but his Father’s was what he would follow. Once again, one must think that Lucifer had an irrevocable hand in the whole thing: he was out to kill God. This was the ultimate showdown of good vs. evil (it was literally that). The Passion, and the Cross—the Devil and his angels amassed in the air above Jerusalem to multiply the suffering as greatly as they could—but what they may not have realized: given the circumstance, this is how the Lord wanted things to be. “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.” [John 10:18 NIV] There is a controversial scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where Satan tries to get him to die like a man—yes! on point: in real life, he died as God.

In the words of Blue Oyster Cult, “I’m living for giving the Devil his due.” In the death of Christ is indeed shown the clash between good and evil, for under threat of pain did Christ never think to strike back, never to have overcome the physical forces that were before him, so that he would not be spared the effects of the evil that permeated the world. Bitten into the very stone were the possibility of pain, and none escaped. But in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, a grand lesson to be learned about the consequences of one’s choices. In giving the Devil his due, letting there be so much pain in the world, the Lord shows him that it could be matched by the good, that love conquers all. And so the Lord shows the rest of us. What good would it have been had all evil been prevented from happening? Surely we talk of a worse adjective than it being “academic”, then. Not to say God wanted evil to exist! Can you see a grander view of the Kingdom? He will use what is at hand, but it is of one’s own God given free will to commit the wrong, what is not of God.

Then it is true power: to be able to force the hand of God. It must be the case that the most powerful being in creation was given power in truth. Pain is intrinsic to the structure of the universe: this is Lucifer’s magnum opus. This is that wrench in the works, which you cannot get out else the whole thing falls apart, because now, it is part of the puzzle. Satan knew what he was doing. For now, for God to be just, to show that He doesn’t win by a sort of “deus ex machina”—to give the Devil his due—bad things must happen. You can see that quite readily if you’re a scientist, that if you have such things as plate tectonics, the drift of land masses, then you will have volcanoes and earthquakes. And sometimes, there will be people in their vicinity. So, some of us will throw up their hands and say, “bad luck, chaps,” and some will say they must all have been sinners. None of the above. What’s actually happening? “There are many things which do not concern the process.” [Joan of Arc] There’s a bigger picture we’re not seeing. Perhaps that we don’t want to see.

For blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. [Matthew 5:4] I will go further: blessed are those who fail, those who are confounded when they try and do good; blessed are they who exert a mountain of effort for a molehill of a reward; blessed are they who are paid back evil for a good they gave; blessed are those who are humiliated for no reason at all; and blessed are they whose lives are brutish and cut short, for lo, thy reward is great in Heaven, where fate is not subject to the whim of evil—but is laid out by Holy Reason himself, whom you call Jesus Christ. He forgets none who have been robbed of life or dignity, and his will is the last word in the realm called Eternity. Jesus Christ died as he did to show you exactly whose side he was on. And there will be no stone you can crawl under that will not be overturned, nothing done in secret that will not be exposed. Woe to those who have something to hide, who has done his neighbor wrong.

The main point? There is always a reason why. The Devil will randomize the pain where he can, and bad things will happen to good people. Don’t be deceived. Nothing is outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Logos, yea, Holy Reason itself. Even if it all ends horribly, that is not a permanent condition. Why did it have to happen like this? If you truly saw what was at stake for the things that transpired in this world, in this life, you would not ask such questions. Count it all joy: and that, too, will be rewarded. One day you will see why things unfurled as they did, and rejoice when your faith was shaken, but did not buckle under the strain to comprehend why. No natural disaster is larger than the purpose that undergirds it. We are greater than any pain that has run through us; we are made larger by it. This is the mystery of the quotient: tragedy makes a saint of any of us.

Do not concern yourself with any thing. Nothing is wasted. Even the evil ones, who are burned into nothing at the Last Judgment: the harm they have caused has gone to good use—in the making of the saints. Do not imagine any setback has slipped from the accounting of the angels. And it is not so much the important that the saints we are to be will go to Heaven when we die, but that in being saints we bring Heaven down into the world by the love we show. Not to hide a lamp in a bucket, but to shine it from the rooftops. And all of us are to die as God did, who in the worst of it yet loved the world. This is to take part in the Resurrection. And pain? It points to that deeper way, that there will be now what is called justice, which in the days before the world ever was, it was not known: because it had no context where nothing was ever wrong. A fascinating birth, in the world as we know it: justice. There will be justice wherever there has been pain. It is what God made out of fire.